Culture

Canon's new app will help you bulk-delete bad photos and find the gems

"Save the best, delete the rest."

A woman in a white shirt is seen in similar photos in front of a grassy background. The app for Cano...
Canon

Canon knows how tedious it can be to go through a whole gallery of photos and not know which ones are the absolute best and which should never see the light of day. To help, the photography titan has introduced a new AI-driven service called Photo Culling that's designed to weed out the duds.

The app recently went live in the App Store for users in the United States. While the download is for free, you will have to pay $2.99 per month or $14.99 per year to take advantage of Photo Culling's full suite of options, which runs on artificial intelligence.

Two options — Canon's Photo Culling has two modes: Similar Culling and Whole Culling. Powered by artificial intelligence, Similar Culling has a simple job: spot all similar photos, group them together and then nix the ones that are not the best. That leaves one or two theoretically perfect photos. The rest get deleted if you approve.

Canon

In Whole Culling, your photo receives an AI rating based on four separate metrics: noise, sharpness, facial expressions, and the possibility of spotting closed eyes. Photos will get deleted in instances where these four issues are most prominent. What's helpful about Photo Culling is that it also gives you an estimate of what seems to be an ideal photo. Once you see these suggestions, you have the option to throw them in the bin or keep them in your gallery.

Meet PHIL — The entire app is powered by Photography Intelligence Learning (PHIL), which gives you approximate scores of noise, sharpness, and other details in your photos. "With our AI Technology," Canon claims, "you can quickly and easily cull through a high volume of photos to find the best." Given that people are constantly snapping selfies and other types of photos, we're pretty interested to see how Photo Culling lends a virtual helping hand to professional and amateur photographers.

Canon also says that it won't store your personal information via photos, according to TechRadar. Still curious? Canon's Photo Culling isn't entirely new as a concept. Google Photos, for example, lets you enable automatic selection for similar photos and arranges your album based on shared themes between your snaps. You know, like the thousandth time you took a photo of a sunset.